About Us

Our mission is to maintain and restore native bird diversity, populations, and ecosystems in Hawaii and the Pacific Region

We work together with local communities, government agencies, and other conservation organizations to achieve our goals; we are solidly a ‘boots on the ground’ organization. We do this by creating ‘islands’ within islands where predators have either been removed and excluded through fencing, or are controlled on a long term basis. We then work to restore the habitat in these areas, and in some cases, bring bird species back that are no longer found there through translocation and social attraction. Throughout all of our work, we actively conduct research to understand avian biology, and the ecosystem changes and benefits to inform future conservation actions. To date, we have published more than 110 peer-reviewed papers in high-profile scientific journals and had our work featured in media outlets such as the New York Times, National Geographic and the BBC.

Pacific Rim Conservation was founded in 2006 as we saw a need for research-based management on native species, particularly birds, throughout Hawaii and the Pacific. Island species, particularly those in Hawaii, are some of the most imperiled on earth and with so few individuals of some species, research was sorely needed to inform management actions. For nine years we filled that niche operating as a small business and in June 2015, we converted from a business to a 501(c)3 non-profit organization in order to better reflect our goals and to ensure that as much of our funding as possible was used to achieve our conservation projects.

Our impact:

Our projects:

Our main goal in the coming years is “no net loss” of bird habitat in Hawaii- you can read more about this on the project website www.islandarks.org. To stem the loss of nesting habitat for seabirds, whose primary nesting islands in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are being lost to sea level rise, we are creating new, safe nesting sites for them on high-islands by creating ‘mainland islands’. Our two current flagship projects are the Nihoku Ecosystem Restoration Project at Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge on Kauai and the Albatross translocation project at James Campbell National Wildlife Refuge on Oahu. Both projects involve full-scale ecosystem restoration from predator proof fencing, to predator removal, habitat restoration and seabird translocation to restore the avifauna of the area.